Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 10, 1994 TAG: 9410140025
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Carrie Buck's story was plenty dramatic. From a poor family in Charlottesville, she was raped as a teen-ager. The assault left her with a daughter, as well as accusations she was a bad girl.
Virginia's eugenicists, hell-bent on sterilizing the poor, the deaf, the blind, the epileptic and anyone else not considered the cream of the genetic crop, committed Buck to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Amherst County.
Her forced sterilization there was chosen as a legal test case for the nation. It was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 and led other states to forcibly sterilize thousands of other men and women.
But screenwriters of "Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story," now showing on the Lifetime cable channel, have treated Buck little better than Virginia authorities did.
The moviemakers depict her as mentally retarded. In fact, it was questionable whether Buck was retarded at all. The eugenics movement targeted many people who were not retarded.
Buck's letters have been judged by scholars as having more literary merit than those of the superintendent of her institution.
One of the movie's problems was in casting deaf actress Marlee Matlin as Buck and then trying to portray Buck as a hearing person, but one who is barely able to communicate with the people around her.
Matlin is a daring performer, and she is to be commended for her empathy for Buck's story. But neither she nor the screenwriters nor the director understood Buck.
"Using [Matlin's] deaf speech to characterize mental retardation was just a disaster," a disservice to both the deaf community and the mentally retarded, said J. David Smith, co-author of "The Sterilization of Carrie Buck" (New Horizon Press, 1989).
Smith, an education professor at the University of South Carolina who has worked with mentally retarded people for years, was disturbed that the movie doesn't even question that Buck was retarded, "which I've always thought was questionable."
Then to have a mentally retarded person using what is commonly called "deaf speech" was all the more confusing. "I've never encountered anyone with mental retardation who speaks like that," said Smith.
"For deaf people," he said, "I'm afraid the portrayal wrongly associates deafness with mental retardation."
Paul Lombardo, a University of Virginia law professor and another authority on the Buck case, also was disappointed with the show. He read a publicity piece that said Carrie Buck was deaf. She was not.
In a Los Angeles Times story, Matlin says Buck was a hearing person but that "she wasn't hearing in a sense that we consider a normal functioning woman." How did Matlin arrive at this judgment?
The movie actually neglects the Buck character and spends much of its time on a love affair between a fictional feminist lawyer and a male lawyer who's supposed to represent Buck.
Screenwriters rarely seem to know how to depict poor people. They either turn them into helpless, uncivilized victims, as they did in Buck's case, or they romanticize them with too much makeup and sentimentality.
The movie writers accurately cover the complicated legal history of the Buck case and its connections with Nazi Germany. Why couldn't they have been as careful with Buck's life?
They fail to mention that after Buck was released from the institution, she had a loving marriage with a former Bland County game warden and justice of the peace. She sang in the choir of a Methodist church.
She spent her last years caring for the sick and the elderly. "For all the abuse, she continued to be a caring person," said Smith.
She died at a Waynesboro nursing home in 1983. Toward the end, she read newspapers, worked on crossword puzzles and played Mary in a Christmas pageant. The nursing home staff said she was alert and pleasant, clearly not mentally retarded.
Marlee Matlin said she chose to play Buck because "...she had nothing. She didn't even have a life."
Yes she did, Marlee, but you missed it.
Mary Bishop has written extensively about the eugenics movement.
by CNB